Ending domestic violence isn’t possible until systemic racism ends, say advocates
By Amanda Kippert Aug 10, 2020 ~ DomesticShelters.org
Racism and violence have long been intricately linked, feeding off each other like rivaling wildfires. In the last several months, the U.S. has experienced an amplified uprising for racial justice, calling for attention to the problem of systemic racism that has oppressed people of color for decades.
Among the root causes of domestic violence in Black communities specifically, 72.6% of participants in the 2017 Black Leaders Survey on Domestic Violence cited systemic racism, a factor ranking slightly behind economic stress (85.6%), childhood trauma (84.9%) and substance abuse (72.6%).
Racism perpetuates domestic violence in all races—Asian-American, Indigenous, Hispanic and Latinx, Black and more—and advocates say ending one issue cannot be done until both are eradicated.
Shelters May Not Be Seeing All Survivors
“There are people in this field who really only see domestic violence as a single-issue factor, which in and of itself contributes to the problem,” says Tonya Lovelace, a global intersectional thought leader and movement maker with 25 years experience in ending gender-based violence. Lovelace says that domestic violence programs need to consider that they may be complicit in systemic racism because their services are designed to only adequately serve limited populations of people.
“Gaining access to services has to do with seeing yourself in the services and feeling like it’s accessible to you. We know there’s a long-time concern that service providers will see or hear or understand us or really from our perspective share our common practices. There’s often just a lack of understanding…. for that reason, I’ve found women of color will often stay longer in their relationships because they don’t see services accessible to themselves.”
In a video called “Connecting the Dots,” created by the nonprofit Futures Without Violence last September, Vanessa Timmons with the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence talks about how women of color can encounter a condemning stereotype when trying to find help.
“The lens of bias through which survivors of color are viewed in shelter impacts how long they stay in shelter, whether or not they feel they get access to the same services and whether or not they get evicted.” Timmons says women of color are sometimes painted as “difficult,” “loud,” “poor parents,” or looked at as “angrier” than other survivors.
Microaggressions—defined as demeaning or threatening social, educational, political or economic cues that are communicated individually, institutionally, or societally to marginalized groups—were experienced by Black women who stayed in a shelter and participated in research published in the 2014 issue of Journal of Black Psychology. Most commonly the microaggressions were listed as a lack of culturally specific products and foods, a homogenous composition of shelter staff and marginalized conversation among victims.
Nonetheless, 93% of the women said they felt the issues they experienced were not racist and were not intentionally exclusionary, and that they would feel comfortable returning to the shelter.
Colsaria Henderson is with CORA, or Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse, in San Mateo, Calif. She’s spent 25 years in the domestic violence movement, the last two as CORA’s executive director. She says the systems put in place to help survivors were not created with Black people’s needs in mind. Within her organization, she’s been working toward more inclusionary services. It’s been a struggle, she says.
“CORA was run by an amazing and highly supportive white woman, but we are very different in how we see the world and our experiences. I want survivors to see their community reflected in the staff. I want to see a Black or brown face, ideally many.
“There are higher rates of Black and brown survivors being labeled as aggressive, and being exited from shelter as a result. There’s a different idea that happens when someone with brown skin gets upset than someone with white.”
Representation can make all the difference between disclosing abuse or not.
“It does matter who they’re seeing. To see a reflection of yourself and your community and your understanding—you’re looking for that in your most vulnerable situations,” says Henderson. “You’re looking to trust that this individual is not going to judge you… all of us would be looking for that.”
